One Summer
by TGBMcCray
Summary: Cleaning up, working it out, and moving on. Bella's determined. He's relaxed. The summer they meet, temperatures climb.
1. Chapter 1

The trash mocks me in ways that the stillness of this house and the too sweet smell of old people I will never see again haunt me. I've only just begun the cleanup and already I have sat down in Granddaddy Ace's chair and cried three times. Once it was his ball cap, which I plucked from between the chair and the wall with shaking fingers. The second time was just because. This time, it's the trash.

I started in the upstairs bathroom, arguably the messiest and most important for my sanity in the weeks I will remain here. Little bottles – greenish blue, pink, and gold –some glass, some plastic, from decades and just months prior, form a colorful almost sea glass-like picture at the bottom of a Kroger bag. The picture looks like my childhood. Jars of Vick's VapoRub and Goldbond powders and Pepto bottles clink and squish around as I tie up memories and carry them down to the doors of the three seasons porch. I used the Kleenex for my face and then I flattened that box and added it to the pile.

It's hot out here like it always has been in June. The heat settles on you like a wet blanket and it won't let go, but instead of smothering the grease fire, it ignites one in your soul. You can't run from this heat. You can't run from anything, not really.

I look around a minute and get a bit lost in all her plants gone wild in this mini greenhouse, which he refused to give away even when they'd overrun the porch and his ability to care for them. I have to do something about them. I have to do something about all of it. One thing at a time. Rosa said that yesterday and she will say it when she shows up today. She won't complain because she is Cuban and Granddaddy said when you grow up under Communism, all the complaint gets worked right out of you.

I walk every bag out to the curb instead of waiting and taking a load. It's the feeling of accomplishment but it's also a respite. I may be breathing in wet air, but it's fresh. I cannot smell old medicine or the linger of his aftershave.

Across the street, the neighbor raises his hand as he's fiddling with a rusty-looking push mower. He's the youngest person I've seen on this street, and to be honest, he could be a gardener. He's got a lit cigarette hanging out of his mouth, but he doesn't leer at me even though I'm wearing next to nothing to keep from shriveling up under the long suffering and nearly worthless central air unit.

"Gonna be a hot one." His eyes are wet and green as the grass that curls almost to his ankles. He cocks his head at me like waiting for I don't know what. I guess he expects me to reply but I don't. Of course it's gonna be hot. It's already 85 at 9 a.m. The palm tree behind him looks like it's giving up on life. The trunk is peeling and the fronds kind of bow down to his shoulders like they are weeping. "Well, stay cool, Miss." He fires up the mower with one long pull of the cord and goes ambling along behind it, his cigarette clenched in a mouth too pretty for the kind of work he seems to do. I stand there a second, watching his biceps and triceps work that mower since he can't be bothered with shirts that have sleeves and then I turn back to Granddaddy's.

Yeah, it's hot all right. Just like hell.


	2. Chapter 2

**Um. Wow. Thank you, thank you, thank you, to each and every one of you for reading, and to PattyRosa and NicFicWhisperer for spreading the word and the love. You are all awesome. I'm still writing CR. I promise I have not abandoned it. This is just for fun.**

By the time I head back out with a second, much larger trash bag filled with approximately fifty bottles of expired Cutemol and Brylcreem, the noise of the mower has stopped. Great. Maybe he's on to the next house and I can put out the trash in peace.

Two steps into the smokehouse air of the front yard, I realize I have hoped for too much. Mister Sweaty Sex is lounging on the porch swing of the little blue house knocking back a frosty glass. I try to ignore him. It's apparent, unfortunately, that he will not be returning the favor.

He's looking this time. I feel his eyes on my tiny gray yoga shorts, and my knowledge and embarrassment makes itself known on my exposed neck and chest in my racer back tank. It's so hot, everything with a pulse is blotchy. It isn't just me.

The lid of the ancient green rollaway trash receptacle has swollen from the heat. The metal clasp burns my fingers. I don't know how it's not molten by now. The bag slips out of my other hand as I curse at the trash bin.

"They stick when it's hot like 'is." He slowly makes his way across the lawn, carrying a mason jar in each hand of orange liquid. He holds them out for me to take, and I'm just standing here, open-mouthed and lost. "Here. Hold these," he says, and so I do. "Come on, there, girl. Give it up." He pops the clasp by ramming his elbow backward into it. It snaps open and he pats the lid. "You just gotta know how to talk to 'em, right?"

I have no idea what to say. Up close, his eyes are ringed with deep laugh lines and eyelashes that would probably be scandalously long if they weren't bleached nearly white from the sun. His reddish-tinged dark hair is buzzed. It's likely a precaution against the heat, and although I hate myself for thinking it, I kind of want to run my hand over it to see if it's spiky like beard hair or soft.

He takes one of the cool jars back, and his fingers brush my hand. He is rough everywhere up close, from his fingertips to his light dusting of rusty stubble. Who has stubble at this hour?

"Mimosa?"

"I beg your pardon?"

He's grinning at me, a lop-sided smile that invites me to smile back and ratchets the heat out here up about twenty degrees. My foot in my black flip-flops finds the curb behind me and puts a few steps between us.

He leans forward and touches me with his shoulder. I can feel his skin momentarily against mine through the snarls of my long, straight hair. I need to dye it again. The red is fading.

"Mimosa? It helps with the heat. You know what I'm saying?"

Across the street, that red and black rattrap of a mower seems to shimmer in the sun. My watch says it's 10:35. "I…no. No, thank you." I try to hand him back the jar but he won't take it. "Does your employer approve of you drinking on the job?"

He's still smiling. I cannot fathom why. From the back pocket of his khaki shorts, he pulls a dirty white rag. His grips the trash bag in one hand and slips the rag under the edge of the trash bin latch while gulping his drink. He has one of those Adam's apples that show off the throat without looking too pointy or creepy.

"No mimosa? How bout plain OJ? We got pulp and no pulp. And scrambled eggs. I put Cajun in 'em but I could make you some plain ones if you don't like it spicy." He won't stop smiling. "Grapefruit? French toast? We just finished brunch. Why don't you come on over?"

He stands there, eyeballing me and drinking out of his cold jar while I gape at him. His arms aren't just toned. They are powerful in ways that the men in my office back home would need HGH to achieve. He's fluid all over, easy and laid back in a way that works with his deep suntan, like caramel or molasses and milk.

"You aren't working over there?"

He actually winks at me. It's just a flick of one eyelid but something in me tightens when he does it. "Well, I work a lot, but no. Today's my day off. I'm afraid I'm your neighbor." He cocks his head. "Least I think so. You're one of Ace's kin, ain't you?"

I shove the drink back at him and he takes hold of it to keep it from hitting the concrete between his hiking-booted feet.

"I'm his granddaughter, and I do not want a drink at 10:30 in the morning. But thank you, just the same." I'm backing up the driveway now, little cautious steps backward as though he were a wild animal. I am not entirely certain that he isn't. He could be dangerous, that's for sure.

"You Bella? Ace talked about you all the time. Sure do miss that old man. Whole neighborhood does."

I turn and sprint toward the house. I can't stay out here in this. I can't breathe like it is, just strangling the ever-living shit out of me with the humidity and his easy words piling up on top of me. I won't hear him talk about Granddaddy like he knew him, like he's never coming back. I don't want to talk about him. I can't think about it. I can't do this right now.

He calls out across the yard as the screen door slams behind me. "I'll see you around, Miss Bella. You take 'er easy in there."


	3. Chapter 3

The toilet, sink, and tub are relatively clean, if a bit dusty. It's nothing a Magic Eraser and some elbow grease won't fix. Rosa left everything else up here alone at Granddaddy's order, but she wouldn't let the place fall apart either. What I've got now is five years worth of dust and who knows how many decades of clutter. Still, it's better than starting on the main floor, where he's actually been living since his knees finally made the stairs an impossibility.

There's a silence to the house now on both levels that makes me itch almost more than the ever-present dust. I've pulled out all the towels under the sink and killed three spiders and there was no one here to hear my shrieking. He would've laughed. He would've taken his cane and tapped the wall by his chair and told me to "settle down, girlie. They're more afraid of you than you are of them!"

I fill another trash bag nearly full with old bottles of VO5 shampoo and White Rain hairspray that belonged to Gramma. Mom said she would do this. Mom says a lot of things.

She is currently in Europe, somewhere. While she gallivants around hostels like a teenager, I am here, in the midst of a mess I should've seen to before now. I should've been here before now. I should've been here when he–when it happened. Instead I was up north, fighting for something I could never win, and every time I called, Granddaddy would say something about how he wanted me to be happy and then he'd change the subject to food or the weather. "Don't worry, girlie. Yesterday Rosa made me banana bread. No, with Splenda. She's a good nurse, that one. Good lookin', too," and then he'd cackle so loud I swear his false teeth probably rattled.

There's an awful smell in here and it takes me a few minutes to look down and realize that I have gripped this old bottle of shampoo so hard that the petrified plastic sides have cracked. Energizing Citrus shampoo is running down my hand. It's so quiet in here, except the humming of the air unit that I know needs work. The water sounds like a murder in the sink, rising out from the bowels of the house somewhere and pouring into the gold-specked sink like that endless scream in the painting.

My shorts are a cleaner towel than the dust rags under my feet. They need to go down to the laundry, and probably to the thrift store on the coast. I force myself to take the bag and the towels downstairs. One foot, one step, one bag at a time. You cannot organize clutter, says the FlyLady in her emails. You have to get rid of it. I have to do this.

There is no one else.

* * *

Maybe I'm hyper sensitive to sounds, but the roar of that blasted mower seems to shake the windows of the house the next time I hear it. Worse, I think there's a weed eater or something going also because the two sounds seem to feed off of each other and grow louder, in a 2/2 time.

My head is practically inside the dryer, feeling around to see if a warped drum is responsible for the mind-rattling noise it makes, when I realize the reason the mower sounds so close is that he's mowing this yard, not his.

What in the actual fuck is wrong with that hick anyway?

I manage to bang my head on the dryer on the way out, and my eyes are smarting with tears again – this time of rage – when I stumble out through the three seasons porch and rip open the door. Gomer Pyle is about to get a piece of my mind.

Children have overtaken Granddaddy's yard. Children who look exactly alike. One, a long-armed, long-legged overgrown weed of a boy, waves at me when he sees the door open and stops the rusted push mower mid-swipe. He starts making his way toward me while another one, dressed similarly in an Avengers t-shirt and ratty khaki shorts, is murdering Gramma's roses with a pair of hand-held trimmers. Rose boy is the bigger threat here. The yard will survive.

"What in the name of God do you think you're doing, kid? These are hybrid tea roses. You can't just hack at them any which way you please!" I don't mean to shout, but these roses, they're hers. They're a mess, I know, but he'll destroy them.

Except he isn't. Shock stops me still within about two foot of him. His dark auburn hair is spiky on top and still it falls into his eyes in places. The sides are nearly shaved, short and fading into the mess of sweaty thickness on his crown. He's holding proper pruning shears in one gloved hand. There's a basket over his forearm on the other side. In it are the shoots he has trimmed and a large pile of shriveled blossoms. His hand is frozen at the base of a wilted bella'roma. He's holding the clippers just above a five-fold leaf.

"Who are you?" I know the answer, I can see it in the shape of his dark eyes, but I hold out hope, even as I notice the neighbor across the street weed eating around his hedges in safety glasses and ear buds.

The mowing boy romps the final few feet to join us, sticking out his hand before he even makes it. "Heya, I'm Rhett." He pulls off his Marlins ball cap, and runs his hand over his closely cropped dark hair as he nods toward the boy in our roses. "This 'ere's Chance. Papa sent us over. He said you might need some help with the yard. We won't mess it up. We work with Papa in the summers so we know what we're doing, you know?"

I don't know. I don't know what he's talking about, but he's a kid, so I take a deep breath and try to find my tact. "How old are you?"

Rhett answers while Chance snips the bloom and stows it in the basket. "Ten, but we'll be eleven next month. Hey, I can sweep the driveway when I'm done but I need to borrow a broom because Dad lent ours (it sounds like "are's") out and they didn't bring it back. What's your name, Miss?"

If he took a breath during any of that, I didn't notice. Chance is laying the trimmers in his arm basket and watching me with wide, deep brown eyes that probably look nearly black when the sun isn't lighting them up like new ground.

I could correct it, tell him it's Missus, but I don't see the point. I won't be a missus much longer. My arms cross in front of me, but I answer as politely as I can. "I'm Bella Swan. Ace O'Brian, the man who lived here before, he was my grandpa."

"Like this rose?" Chase is fingering one of the good blooms, the bella'roma, his dark, tanned fingers with the dirt under the nails a stark contrast to the blush of the pink and white-tinged rose with the yellow center. He doesn't make eye contact.

"Well, yes. Gramma bought those because of me. I'm a lot older than that rose. But those–" I point to the Zephirine Drouhin trying to overtake the east side of the house – "those roses have been around even longer than me."

"Them pink ones smell awesome." Rhett smiles widely and his front teeth are a bit off center. I assume that Chance's look the same, since everything but their haircuts seem the same, at least in a superficial physical way, but he hasn't smiled yet so I can't be sure. "Maybe we can take a cuttin' to Mama, sometime, if that's okay with you?"

I'm still processing that there must be a Mrs. Hick somewhere around when Chance nearly startles me out of my skin by reaching his hand into my hair where it tangles down by my rib cage. "How do you get your hair this color?" He's rubbing the tips through his fingers, examining it so intently that I try very hard to hold still.

"I just dye it. When the red washes out, it starts to go kind of pink like this."

"I like it." It's the first time he makes eye contact. There's a softness to him that his wiry, hyper brother seems to lack. He looks over at Rhett, who's biting his lip and staring now, and slowly drops my hair. "Sorry," he says, and it's a mumble of a word, under his breath, and he turns back to the roses.

"Oh. Well, it's not a big deal. Um. Thanks, boys, for all this. I'll, uh, I'll just get that broom." In my peripheral, I see Rhett clap his brother on the back before heading back to the mower.

As I'm heading around to the garage side of the house, the noise of the weed-eater dies away. The neighbor pulls another rag out of his shorts pocket and mops his face with it. He throws me a big thumbs up and hollers loudly enough he can probably be heard at the beach. "No charge!"

* * *

Rhett is nearly finished with the yard and Chance has cleaned up almost all the hybrid teas in front of the three seasons room when I walk back over to the little blue house. Edward sticks his Brillo head out the door, and then his hand, and introduces himself as Edward Masen. He reemerges with two ice water jars and offers me one end of the wooden swing on the little concrete porch. He rocks us with one boot. The other he swings along in time with the breeze. Everything about him moves with an internal rhythm set to simmer.

He's divorced. They share joint custody. The boys are here every other week and he puts them to work with him in the summer at his lawn business, so I wasn't totally off base when I assumed he was a gardener. I still feel a bit of an ass about it, though.

"They're nearly eleven?" I don't mean for it to come out like a question, but the idea of children, especially big nearly-teenage boys like this is kind of mind-blowing to me.

"Yeah. Well, I was young and stupid, but what're ya gonna do? I love 'em. I loved them then and I sure do now." He's almost obscene, drinking the ice water. His throat is a thing of beauty, which makes me sound crazy, but these days I am a little. He's thirty-two, so just a year older than me. These boys are well behaved, at least so far. They're normal.

He's doing a good job.

"Rhett's quite a charming kid," I say, paying attention to the geraniums in their copper-colored pots and not to his big rough hands around his mason jar. "His name suits him."

He laughs. I love it when men laugh. Granddaddy could wake up a room with his laugh, and back in the day, Mike's laugh used to make me see things I didn't know existed. Possibility, mostly.

Edward Masen's laugh sounds like hard work, and cold drinks and warm bread, and games in the front room with the TV glowing on silent, and just, I don't know, home. "Carmela named him." He fingers the chains on his side of the swing. "She loves Gone With the Wind."

"And Chance?"

"I got to name 'em. Nice thing about twins. You don't have to fight over the name. Course Carmela can fight over the sky being blue, so..." He shrugs, and his big shoulders rise and fall but it doesn't look like a bitter gesture. He seems like he accepts everything like this, rocking on a porch swing, letting it be.

My fingers are cool from the ice water and I press them into the pulse point of my neck because it's up to 95 and it's not stopping any time soon. "Why Chance?"

Across the way, the boy carefully cuts a single blossom and holds it up to the sun, turning the stem in his hands as though it were made of cut glass.

Edward watches but his eyes seem to see not the scene in front of us but one many sleeps ago when the twins in the yard were but a few pounds of warm skin and soft cotton.

"They were my chance to be a better man."

I feel like Rhett because I should let it rest, but I can't. "Did it work?"

He laughs again and he sounds just like granddaddy for a second, in the old days when he was about to tell me a big fish story. "Depends on the day, I reckon," he says, and he pushes off a big push so that the wind blows through and lifts my hair. I lean back into the swing and just smile.

I may not know anyone anymore as honest as this man seems to be.


	4. Chapter 4

**Thank you ever so much.**

Edward was cutting the lawn and doing the trimming for Granddaddy until Mom came back in February. She told him they didn't have the money to continue so he dropped back to once every other week, and then for free, but when she took off last month he waited to see if the house would go up for sale. He wasn't sure about the liability if it was with a real estate company and he was taking care of the lawn against the owner's permission. Rosa had set it up before as a favor to Emmett, her husband and his buddy, when he'd moved here last fall but he'd been concerned about starting up again.

"Damn shame I gotta worry bout that kinda stuff but you never know these days." He puts his water down on a little wood slat table next to the swing. He smells like sweat and smoke and maybe a little bit of bacon. It's simultaneously the most disgusting and the most enticing thing ever. He's like every pool boy fantasy come to life, and I am so, just, annoyed with myself for thinking so. His t-shirt says, "My brother went to Harvard…in a jar." There's a picture of a brain underneath it. Yeah, I'm distracted but what he's saying somehow gets through the hormones that hit you when sitting next to pure testosterone after an eight-month dry spell. I nearly drop the Mason jar in my hand.

"Didn't have the money?" This makes no sense. Granddaddy invested well. He was an engineer, and we lived modestly. There's a lot of money, even. I know. It's been a sticking point with Michael, who wants to see the will, who wants to know what I might inherit besides the house before he signs the necessary legal documentation to dissolve our farce of a marriage. What the hell is this, didn't have the money? "What do you mean? Granddaddy wasn't poor. There's enough money. Of course I'll be paying you and the boys for the yard."

"It ain't a big deal. Neighbors help one another, y'know?" His arm around the back of the swing is suddenly too close to me.

"No." I come forward on the swing and Edward's foot goes down hard on the concrete to even out the momentum and keep us from pitching forward. "No. I appreciate what you did, but I will pay the boys and I will pay you the back money you are owed. I don't know what my mother was thinking, but the money is there." I stand but the glass is still in my hand and I don't know what to do with it now. He reaches out for it and as he takes it from me, he touches the bones of my wrist with the pad of his thumb.

"Okay, Bella, okay." He's holding the jar and me gently, and I don't know really which might be more breakable. "Can I call you Bella? Listen, I didn't mean to insult you or whatever. I knowed your granddaddy was good for it. I used to take him to the bank and on all his errands and stuff when Rosa was busy. He told me some about workin' at Kennedy. All's I know is what your momma told me later, though. I didn't mean nothing by it."

He's uneducated, or at the very least he has never cottoned to English class. I want to march across the street and be done with this attempt at normal human civility. I want to sneer the way I know that Michael would, and tell him he has no idea who Granddaddy was, but I cannot. I can't because somewhere inside I am less upset with his familiarity and his diction than with the fact that he was able to do things for Granddaddy that I wish I could have done, that I should have done. Granddaddy, intelligent beyond most measures and decent to his very core, would be disappointed in me today. I came over here to try to make it up to him and already I am ruining it.

I look at the crack in the porch, over by the edge, and how it fans out this way in a couple of snaky lines beneath my flip-flops. "I'm sorry." It's so hot out here and his hand on me is making me overheated in the strangest way, like how you feel sick down in your gut right after you burn your hand on the stove and just before you start cussing because the pain is there. It's a half second away and nothing can stop it coming for you. "I'm sorry, Edward, you've all been great…I just, I –"

He lets go of my wrist. I don't know whether that helps or not.

Rhett has walked the mower back over to their yard and Chance has disappeared while his dad and I were chatting. The more rambunctious boy appears, wiping his throat with a square of blue handkerchief.

"It's lookin' better right, Miss Bella?" He wears his daddy's slow grin like a beacon of hope. It radiates across the street between our two houses, his Spanish-style and Granddaddy's colonial. "We need to do the trim work and keep after all them roses, but it's a start."

"Best leave the weedeatin and whatnots for another day, son." Edward nods toward me and there's a distance between us again that had almost closed when we were swinging. I mess up everything but it's best this way. I'm not staying. There's no need to make any time with this man and these boys. "Miss Bella's probably had enough noise for one day."

The thing about kids this age, it's like they know right off when something's afoot. Rhett nods at his daddy, gives me a big goofy smile, and is gone before I can even open my mouth to thank him. The steps off the porch are crumbling on the right side. This house, it was built even before ours. Irene Denali lived here with her husband, and then alone, for years and years. I don't know how it's come to Edward and his kids. I don't know how a gardener could afford rent around here, and he can't be month to month because short-term rentals aren't even allowed on the cape.

"I'm just going to go." I'm looking mostly at the pretty red vodka begonias that spread in a sea of crimson from beside the porch steps to the sidewalk.

"Ace was a fine man." Edward is rocking back on his boots above me. Just looking up at him like this sort of unnerves me and starts up the need to flee inside me, but I keep glancing at the plantings and trying to ground myself. To withstand this man I may have to reach down into the dirt and grow roots. Otherwise, he may keep right on blowing me away.

"You hear me, lady? You're a fine woman, too. Same cloth. You lose a body you loved, it knocks you down. I know that. But we're here, right? We don't get to join 'em till the big man says, so we got to keep on. Pardon me sayin' so, but you do have a right nice smile, miss."

My head snaps up and that slow smile is there on his face, showing just a hint of teeth on one side. His incisors are a little crooked, too. "When–?"

He throws one shoulder back, toward the porch. "On the swing there. Sure would like to see a real wide one soon. We'll see you around, Miss Bella, yeah?"

I swallow, hard. "Just Bella."

His eyebrows rise into his forehead and the little lines around his eyes pull at his skin. His whole face lights, and and he is happy, this man. I want to run inside and scream into a pillow because my mind goes all the wrong places. What can a happy man do in bed? What might a man unconcerned with outcomes do for a woman who makes him smile? What could Edward, with those arms and legs gleaned from manual labor, do with me?

It's got to be a hundred degrees by now. I can't take it. It's making me crazy. Everybody goes a little crazy in the South in the summer. We all do. The heat fries our brains or something. It cooks our best intentions into puddles of sin.

He clicks his tongue at me, the way I might call a dog in the street. Two clicks and I see the tip of his tongue peeking out. "We're glad you're here, Just Bella."


End file.
